Nuhna Nuhna Nuhna Nuhna Nuhna Nuhna Batman!
Since last night when the news broke - working nights meant getting the latest developments as they were released - my coworkers had their usual scatter-brained need to advertise their own ignorance. I can quit facebook, but meatspace is not nearly as easy to opt out of.
First, a disclaimer: I’m writing this more for me than for anyone else, and could probably set this post to private but am sharing it anyways.
Responses to this kind of tragedy that rub me the wrong way:
- Blaming the victims
- Retorts to Straw-men arguments against the 2nd amendment
- Promoting fantasies about vigilante justice as a hedge against random violence
There are others, but that is the short list and I don’t want to spend too much time on this.
Blaming the victims
Fuck You. If you personally knew the victims and these were people close to you; people that made your life better, people who helped you in times of need, people you loved and cared deeply about, would you really appreciate people saying dumb-shit things about how people shouldn’t take their young kids to go see movies? Really? Fuck you. Fuck you in the neck with a rubber cock. No child deserves to be put through that kind of trauma, and blaming the parents is just a petty defense mechanism. I get it though, really I do. Thanks to Disney Corp. and the one-thousand or so brands of Protestant Christianity in this country, Americans have really done a great job of convincing themselves that we live in a world that is inherently just. We believe that if you work hard, make wise decisions, follow the rules, etc. then bad things won’t happen to you. We believe that gods and magic reward the good and punish the bad - and that is bullshit.
Bull.
Shit.
I hate having to state the obvious, but bad things DO happen to good people. This happens every-fucking-day like goddamn clockwork and there really isn’t any explanation for it. The universe as it currently stands really doesn’t care about your career, the health of your children, or whether that steak you ordered will be cooked medium rare. To the universe, all of those things stack equally with every rape, genocide, and extinction event that has or will happen. This entire planet could be bathed in the fires of celestial collision resetting all organic matter present to Year Zero and nothing throughout the universe would change at all. Nothing. Every tragedy and every victory is truly subjective and matters only to us as observers.
This is why we should try being nice to each other. The universe is a cold, heartless bitch that has infinite potential for suffering and it is only through conscious actions that we can make it even barely tolerable to our fragile little bodies. Even if we all treat each other extremely well, we still need to fight against all of the hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, fires, and pandemics that are constantly on the horizon, determined to wipe all of us out. Blaming the victims isn’t just dickish, it reveals your own naïve personal denial and insecurity about life. With any foresight at all, no one would have let something like this happen. No one would willfully put their children in a situation like this. No one.
Retorts to Straw-men arguments against the 2nd amendment
“This is the sort of thing Obama will use as ammo to enact his anti-gun laws.”
“Yeah, better take away the guns from law-abiding citizens; that will fix this!”
“Guess what folks, if you want to live in a free country, you must accept that really bad stuff can and will happen. It's the price for freedom.”
I live in a pretty damn liberal city, but I’ve NEVER - not even once - heard someone say that banning all guns would be a good way to solve these kinds of problems. On the other hand, I’ve personally heard at least two people now suggest that if everyone was well-trained and armed with handguns that shootings like this would never happen. This is not only insulting, it is factually wrong.
Wait. Let me pause this here for a second.
There is a very real need to talk about responsible and effective gun laws in the United States. It is a real issue with real consequences that will affect the lives of millions of people in this country. That being said, CAN WE PLEASE AT LEAST WAIT FOR THE BLOOD TO DRY OUT BEFORE WE START TRYING TO USE THIS TRAGEDY TO BOLSTER OUR OWN POLITICAL OPINIONS? CAN WE DO THAT JUST ONCE? PRETTY-FUCKING-PLEASE WITH A BLOW-JOB ON TOP!
Okay, un-pausing…
I get it. We’re all scared to think about the possibility that this could happen again, and we are equally scared of the incompetent measures that might be taken to prevent this. The approval-rate of congress is at 16% (I can’t think of anyone I personally know that fits within that margin) and it seems as though they are competing with (and losing to) rush-hour traffic and hangnails for popularity. So it goes without saying that the pathetic state of the legislative branch does very little to boost our confidence in them and there is realistically very little reason to expect any of them to leap to the rescue and offer an effective piece of legislation to face up to the shootings that happen every year in this country.
Case in point: April 3, 2009 a 41-year-old man opened fire at an immigrant community center in Binghamton, N.Y., killing 11 immigrants and two workers. Jiverly Wong, a Vietnamese immigrant and a former student at the center, killed himself as police rushed to the scene.
This was during the Democratic Super-majority, where both houses of congress and the Whitehouse were occupied by the supposedly “anti-gun” Party. So what did they do in response to this tragic massacre of innocent civilians? Absolutely nothing. In fact, despite numerous shootings on par with last night’s we have yet to see materialized any heavy-handed legislation to interfere with the ability to bear arms legally in this country. It isn’t unfair - I think - to categorize gun owners as a defensive bunch. After all, the primary reason for most people in this country to keep and bear arms is for the purpose of self-defense. In the spirit of diplomacy, I’d like to recite the four rules of gun safety:
1. All guns are always loaded.
2. Never let the muzzle cover anything you are not willing to destroy.
3. Keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on the target.
4. Be sure of your target and what is beyond it.
I’ve added emphasis to rule number four because it transcends the use of firearms and is pertinent to addressing any kind of threat. Be sure of your target: not all attempts to improve existing policy are a move towards tyranny and or an absolute abolishment of the 2nd amendment. Registering and licensing cars wasn’t part of some “anti-car” agenda, neither was requiring seatbelts. I know that a lot of gun owners possess a certain John Wayne-esque, draw a line in the sand, kind of personality, but if you won’t sit at the table with the grown-ups and have an adult conversation about gun laws, then please don’t complain when things get done without your input. We need gun owners to be a part of this discussion, but we need to be constructive about this. This is a complex issue with many moving parts and we owe it to ourselves to actually examine it with nuance and composure and not knee-jerk reactions and political sound-bites.
Fucking election years...
So, why is it insulting and factually wrong to say “if everyone was well-trained and armed with handguns then shootings like this would never happen”? I’m so glad you asked, because it brings me to my final point:
Promoting fantasies about vigilante justice as a hedge against random violence
Nov. 5, 2009: Major Nidal Malik Hasan, opened fire in a shooting rampage at Fort Hood Army base in Texas, killing thirteen people and wounding thirty.
Really think about this for a minute. Go ahead, I’ll wait right here.
Yeah, so here we have a place that is literally guarded by soldiers 24/7, I.D. check points, fully-stocked armory, guards armed with assault weapons, and some whack-job shows up and starts shooting up the place. We’re talking about a place where a sizeable percentage of the people are trained for combat, these are people who have made a career out of knowing what to do when being shot at, know how to handle a variety of weapons, and it is highly likely that many of them have actively been in combat at some point in their career.
So did Nidal Hasan get taken down by the well-trained and armed at Fort Hood? Damn right. He was shot and found among the wounded. After confirming that he was the gunman he was taken into custody. But before that happened he still managed to kill thirteen people - roughly the same number killed in last night’s rampage. So even being surrounded by fellow soldiers, even with armed Military Police presence and almost everyone in the place having received combat training, this maniac still managed to kill more than a dozen people. Do you really think that some guy with a Concealed Carry Weapons permit was going to do a better job defending people in a movie theatre than a room full of trained soldiers at Fort Hood?
“Ah, but Nidal Hasan was also a soldier with weapons training!” you say. Well, you lose. While Nidal may have had some military schooling, he most certainly was not a hardened-by-combat soldier. He was an Army psychiatrist (Ironic, I know) and Commissioned Officer. His training required him to know how to work an M1A1 lead pencil. His penmanship meant a lot more than his marksmanship and he still killed more than a dozen people before someone got a disabling shot on him.
But let’s play ball on the hypothetical social policy suggested here: Let’s suppose we had a fully militarized society with compulsory military service; where every able-bodied man and woman entered adulthood with a shaved head and some really shiny boots. They all get trained, and some of them fight in wars and after a couple of years we recirculated them into the civilian fold leaving all of them with a common sense of nationalism and personal responsibility. Fantastic. We can all sleep soundly with the fact that all of these same psycho killers will now have military training in addition to mental illness, so I’m sure we’ll all have lots of fun dealing with that - especially the ones that get explosives training. In the end we may have only leveled the playing field a bit, placing greater burdens on law enforcement and private citizens for personal protection since we’d all need to step up our game - after opening this can of worms there’d be no more amateur-hour first timers involved in any future massacres.
I for one think that these events are a symptom of a much broader cultural problem. Americans are barbarians, but we don’t want to admit that to ourselves for some reason. We probably turned a corner with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and have yet to come back from that. Which makes sense; it isn’t easy to reconcile something as horrific as incinerating 100,000 human beings while still calling yourselves a civilization. I’ve been a civilian since 2008 and am just now coming to terms with how cheaply I’ve regarded human life up to this point in my life. Maybe that’s because so many of my peers are now having children of their own and I can see just how much they love their kids.
Our culture has become nightmarishly Darwinian, both economically and socially. I’ve got grandparents on Social Security and Medicare who often forward chain emails warning me about the dangers of Obama’s socialist policies. Why pretend to be neighborly when all we really want is to get ours? During this year’s GOP primary I heard a crowd of people applaud Texas Governor Rick Perry for having executed more people than anyone else. I heard another crowd shout “YEAH!” when Ron Paul was asked if society should let an uninsured man in the hospital die instead of paying for his medical care. We really should stop pretending to be a compassionate society ruled by ethics and morals and start taking ownership of our barbarian ways. At least then we could probably find some outlets for the frustrations associated with a class system where most of the wealth and power is super concentrated to the hands of the few and millions die poor. Instead we’ll probably just adapt (evolve) to this development by having more people pack heat when they go to see a movie. Just do me a favor and don’t shoot the screen if the IMAX 3D happens to be really convincing.